Ukulele Indian Notation Fretboard

Posting just Ukulele Indian Notation Fretboard here for easy access.

Playing Karnatik music with Ukulele

Couple of months ago, I picked up an Ukulele and started learning it using Youtube videos. Started playing some easier tunes and practicing it. I am mostly interested in finger picking the lead notes than use ukulele for chords. Obviously, I still play quite bad, but I see improvement in the results and I am putting in consistent time daily to practice. Here is the playlist where I upload my ukulele recording, do check them out 🙂

I listened to few people playing karnatic music with Guitar on youtube and wanted to do the same with Ukulele. I am not a musician, so looked up some music theory and started understanding the basics on music. To start with, I started by converting Guitar notes to Ukulele to make myself familiar with notes and scale etc. This helped me a great deal. Later, I started playing Karnatic ragas with Ukulele, but they were not as polished as the ones I saw on youtube (with guitar). I have a lot to improve with my skill level. I made this fret board diagram (see image below) for Ukulele for Western and Karnatik notes and I feel it will help some people who are interested in playing Karnatic using Ukulele.

The Ukulele tuning is standard A, E, C, G and the fret board scale is C. There are limitations with Ukulele because you can only go one octave high but cannot go one octave low than the scale. I will post notes for each Karnatik (and also Hindustani) raagas and Movie songs over time. Follow this blog if you want to be updated when I post new notes sheet.

Investment and Insurance

It is important to understand that mixing insurance and investment is a bad idea. People tend to put less effort to understand personal finance and financially literate people are quite rare. In this post I would like to jot down my thoughts, calculations and ideas to explain why it is a bad idea to mix investment and insurance, and, when you mix them, you end up getting neither.

Investment
Goal of an investment is to generate income. What is the rate of return becomes important with an investment. For example, if you do not like to take much risks, one would put the money in the Fixed deposit in a bank, which (in 2020 ) would yield 5-6 % interest.

Insurance
Goal of an insurance (for a person) is to get a guarantee of compensation in case of death, health issue etc. Let’s consider a Life insurance. In case of an unfortunate death of an insured, the insurer promises to pay a sum of money to the nominee (nominated by the dependent) in exchange for a premium that is paid monthly/yearly etc.

Example : LIC Money back policy
Usually people buy these policy because a sum is assured at maturity even if the insured person survives through the duration of the insurance and some tax benefit too. This is a classic example of mixing investment and insurance. Insurance is like a car safety accessory. It is great if they are not put to use, but when disaster strikes, it will benefit you (the nominee in this case). You must not expect any returns from the premiums paid for insurance but in reality people want insurance and some returns on the premiums (if the person survives people expect some returns on the premiums paid).

A typical policy looks like this:
Sum Assured (At maturity) : 500000 Rs. (5 lakhs)
Yearly premium : 33600 Rs.
Money back : 100000 Rs. every 5 years.

Now lets calculate the interest rate on these policy :

Not an Investment :
As you can see, with a typical money back policy, the return you get is a meagre 5% (if you are expecting it to function like an investment). So definitely it fails as an investment, because if you deposit the money in the bank, you would get similar interest rates and you have full freedom on the money, so you can withdraw it when you want.

Not an Insurance :
And god forbid, if anything unfortunate happens, the insured amount is 500000. Which is equivalent to nothing in the year 2020. Of course, policy with an higher insured amount can be taken, say 25 lakhs, but the interest rate is same and 25 lakh, premium would be a more than a lakh per year. So, it definitely fails to be an insurance really. Because with a realistic yearly premium of 33600 Rs, an insurance of 5 lakhs for a person in 2020, is not suffice in my opinion.

Alternative :
So, what can be the alternative, I would say first come up with a ball park number on the amount to be insured for and then look up the options and premiums for that insured amount. The thumb rule is, if you have dependents and you are the sole earner, then 10x your yearly income is the amount you have to be insured. A “term insurance” is the term you need to look up and understand more about. This product is purely an insurance product and does not have any returns (or investment component) in it. If you have better ideas, please leave a comment.

For example, let us say, you want to be insured for 1 Crore and for such a policy, usually the premium is 15000 Rs per year.

Insured amount : 10000000 Rs. (1 Cr)
Yearly Premium : 15000 Rs (this depends on your age, younger you are, this number will be less)
Duration : 40 years plus (depends on your age again)

So, basically, you pay premium every year, and you survive through the duration of the insurance, then you will not get anything (no money back etc). If you are planning to buy one, I would suggest you understand your scenario and then go for the apt one.

And regarding what could be the investment alternative, it is a whole new topic. And I would suggest you to understand personal finance by spending more time on it. I will definitely blog about some ideas which helped me over time.

But for the completeness of this post, let me play with one investment idea which is conservative and also very apt for this case. Initially, we considered a money back policy, with a yearly premium of 33600 Rs and calculated it returned only 5 percent per annum. And, for example I replaced the money back policy with a term insurance with yearly premium of 15000 Rs. Therefore remaining is around 18000+ Rs yearly. This money if you deposit in a PPF account at the beginning of the year, then this will yield 875000 Rs (almost 9 Lakh Rupees) at the end of 20 years. Below is the screenshot of the calculation of this. Obviously we do not know for sure the interest rates ahead of time, But I have taken a conservative number given that the interest rates can only go lower in the near future at least (This post written during the COVID virus prevalence in the world)

What about existing LIC policy:
This is a difficult question, I am afraid, there is no easy solution in which you do not lose a little money unless you continue paying it till maturity. One can surrender the policy pre-maturity, but, you need to calculate which is better option depending on for how long have you paid the premium, what is the loss you would incur etc. A visit to the branch will be helpful.

Summary:
To summarise, in this post, I tried to convince you that a money back policy is a bad idea by taking a general scenario and demonstrating that it is neither a investment product nor a insurance product. And also shed light on a possible alternative idea of replacing money back policy with two different products, which actually exceeds by a good margin as a insurance product (term insurance) and also exceeds returns compared to money back policy as a investment product (PPF).

	Yearly	As Investment (after 20 years)	As Insurance
LIC money back	33600 Rupees	returns 5% CAGR	6 Lakh Rupees
Term Insurance	15000 Rupees	–	1 Crore Rupees
PPF	18600 Rupees	8.75 Lakh Rupees	–

Comparison between LIC money back policy and combination of Term Insurance and PPF.

Disclaimer :
I am not trying to sell any product and this post is more of a thought-dump and not an investment advice 🙂 I would urge everyone to think more deliberately about money and things that money can do and take steps appropriately.

Donut 3D model

Started learning 3D modelling and animation in my spare time. Designed this 3D model using this tutorial on Youtube. The tool used is a free and open source tool called Blender. The tool is packed with features and can do a zillions of things under the hood. This also makes it a little difficult to use it initially. Check it out! and here is the final model of a donut.

Memetic Desires

It’s been so long I wrote something, so here I am trying to write about some of the tools which I have used in recent years to better my living. I will post a series of concepts which are actually a kind of mental models which help seeing the reality better. And also helps to predict the future better and hence better decision making. Primarily it helps to take decisions more independently (not sure to what extent this is true).

Renè Girard was a french philosopher, anthropologist and historian. He theorised that human desires are not original or rational. We (humans) want something not because it is rational necessity or because of the inherent quality of the object we desire etc. We desire something because some other person or other people want it. Our desires are imitated and it is automatic and cannot be controlled even if we are aware that we are imitating. This imitation of desires is called Memetic Desire. Imitation is a helpful trait for all living beings. Humans learn most things by imitating like how a kid learns to navigate in this world, language, any particular skill etc and this is the useful part of imitation and we call it good imitation. We do so by desiring the object (skill etc) that other person is having (other person has it because that person desired to have it) and then imitate that person. If the object desired is only one or limited in number, then conflict arises. This conflict gives rise to violence, scapegoating. We will not be discussing about violence and scapegoating in this post.

The picture below depicts the phenomenon which is actually in a triangular form. You look up to someone (mediator in the picture) because that person is famous, rich or smart etc and start imitating their desires. It is not just you want the object of desire but you want to be seen to others as the person who has those objects irrespective of you have it or not. You can see this happening on daily basis. People buy followers or buy views on tweet etc because they want to be seen as a person with lot of followers and usually do not want to work towards it. Also most people desire to be seen as a smart person and not being a smart person. It is more status seeking than substance seeking in reality.

Mediator in the picture can become your role model or rival based on your perception of how far ahead the mediator is from you. If your perception is that mediator is equal to you, then this convergence of similar desires because of imitation results in conflict and a rivalry arises. If the perception is that the mediator is far ahead of you or higher than you in some abstract sense then that person becomes a role model to you. The marketing industry understands triangular desire intuitively and thats why you see ads which portray a famous athlete wearing a nice shoe etc. There is always a mediator and an object of desire. As a culture this ends up into status signalling where people tries to signal their status without much inherent value but by show casing the proxy for value (Eg likes, followers, luxury etc which is not that valuable themselves)

Even though concept of Memetic desire is simple, its implications are far greater and it actually shapes societies and communities. It also explains religious rituals, what is allowed and what is not allowed within a community, how much company culture is important etc.

There are many other emergent behaviours where people are against following others and in turn they follow something as anti-imitation which results in imitation itself and can be called anti-memetic mimesis. Imitation of others is inescapable, it is something intrinsic to humans (and other living beings too). It is always tempting to think that I am somewhat not affected by it. Hence, we need to be careful of the role model we seek to imitate.

Apple and Brahmin’s Coffee Bar

I follow Apple, a consumer product company regularly. I have also invested lot of my time in understanding the company history, product design ideology, product iterations, how it positions itself in the market, how it differentiates itself from others by tight integration of software and hardware etc. Since I follow it so closely, I tend to see many other things in those lines and try to draw parallels whenever possible. Of course I give it a good thought but I do not think it through all the intricate details as it more of a fun thought experiment. One such parallel I could think of was Brahmin’s Coffee Bar in Basavangudi, Bangalore, India. I visit Brahmin’s Coffee Bar very often and treat myself to the best idli and vades I have ever eaten. Apart from that, this blog post idea was lingering in my mind for eons now, so I wanted to put an end to that procrastination cycle.

Brahmin’s Coffee Bar (referred as BCB from now on) is a small restaurant that serves few South Indian dishes and coffee/tea and it is well known. Have a look at the menu card of BCB in the picture below.

Idli and Vade

As you can see very few dishes are served. Similar to Apple, which does not release whole range of models of phones, instead sells and supports only a small range of products. This helps keep the supply chain lean and react fast to market changes apart from other advantages which I am not fully aware of.

In the second picture you can see the picture of idli and vade in a plate. One thing to notice is that the plate is very simple and lacks unnecessary design complexities which are seen in other similar restaurants. This makes the daily cleaning of dishes and replacement easy. This is similar to Apple, where it provides simple user interface (imho) and does not provide features which are used by only a small percentage of people and useful only in few incidences.

If you know how idli and vade is served in general, apart from noticing there are no partition in plates for chutney and sambar, you can notice there is no sambar. I am guessing it is an intentional omission and probably they have their reasons for it (will try to check and update the reason if I come across). Similarly with Apple, they tend to omit some very important feature that is common with other similar products from competitors due to various reasons such as controlling the hardware, competition etc. For example they removed 3.5mm headphone jack to control their music ecosystem.

If you have ever visited BCB, you can notice that inspite of having lot of customers, the service is quite fast. This enhances customer experience as it helps deliver menu items fast. They do this by limiting the menu and have lots of people to serve the menu items they cook. In Apple too, they tend to do the similar thing. They kind of have lot of support personnel which enhances customer experience.

To summarise, I have jotted down some points which made me think BCB as parallel to Apple. It is more of a fun thought experiment but feel free to provide points in which the analogy breaks or give more inputs to validate my weak claim 🙂

Objects in Space

As 2016 dawns upon me, I await for it with a child-like inquisitiveness and immense hope that it will be another interesting ride in my life. 2015 was special to me, because I have a feeling that I am back to my ‘best me’, the ‘me’ who is curious, confident and ready to take up the new challenge thrown at me. This year I make progress with my german, started learning mandarin. Read books which for me were the best of all I have read till now (though i did not reach my target). Did not run enough. Was mindful and practiced minimalism to the maximum. I have been more disciplined than I could have imagined to be, I am happy about it. I made some good friends though I could not keep in touch with my old ones. So this year has been a mix of ups and downs , like I want it to be. I made some progress with my interest in astronomy and astrophotography. With that note, I look forward to 2016! I leave you all with some pictures of ‘objects in space‘ that I took this month 🙂

All pictures are taken from a xperia Z smartphone and celestron Firstscope telescope.

Moon